Online report of the Progressive Review. For 53 years, the news while there's still time to do something about it.

November 22, 2016

Trump cozy with general who played a leading role in Iraq occupation

So far, little attention has been paid to a retired Army lieutenant general, Joseph ‘Keith’ Kellogg, one of Trump’s closest military and foreign-policy advisers. Kellogg is a former contracting executive who is considered a front-runner for a senior position at the Pentagon. He has been among the small group of advisers seen entering and leaving Trump Tower this week. - Institute for Public Accuracy

Tim Shorrock - Kellogg played a critical role in the disastrous U.S. occupation of Iraq as the director of operations of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran the country after the 2003 invasion. Since leaving the military, he has been deeply involved in the high-tech, computer-driven style of warfare that has spawned the enormous business complex of contractors and suppliers that ring Washington, D.C, from the CIA to the National Security Agency. …

From 2005 to 2009, Kellogg was a top executive with CACI International, one of the companies that supplied interrogators who abused and tortured Iraqi prisoners at the U.S. military prison at Abu Ghraib. …

Last February, in a widely quoted interview on Fox, Trump called the U.S. invasion of Iraq “the worst decision ever made in the history of our country.” In the months that followed, he repeatedly blasted Clinton for supporting the invasion, which — as he rightly argued — planted the seeds for the rise of ISIS, the Islamist terrorist army that U.S., Iraqi, and Kurdish forces are now trying to dislodge from Iraq and Syria. …

SAY IT AGAIN, SAM

ABOUT THE EDITOR

The Review is edited by Sam Smith, who covered Washington under nine presidents, has edited the Progressive Review and its predecessors since 1964, wrote four books, been published in five anthologies, helped to start six organizations (including the DC Humanities Council, the national Green Party and the DC Statehood Party), was a plaintiff in three successful class action suits, served as a Coast Guard officer, and played in jazz bands for four decades.

ABOUT THE REVIEW

Regularly ahead of the curve, the Review has opposed federal drug policy for over 40 years, was a lonely media voice against the massive freeways planned for Washington, was an early advocate of bikeways and light rail, and helped spur the creation of the DC Statehood Party and the national Green Party,

In November 1990 it devoted an entire issue to the ecologically sound city and how to develop it. The article was republished widely.

Even before Clinton's nomination we exposed Arkansas political scandals that would later become major issues. .

We reported on NSA monitoring of U.S. phone calls in the 1990s, years before it became a major media story.

In 2003 editor Sam Smith wrote an article for Harper's comprised entirely of falsehoods about Iraq by Bush administration officials.

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In 1987 we ran an article on AIDS. It was the first year that more than 1,000 men died of the disease.

In the 1980s, Thomas S Martin predicted in the Review that "Yugoslavia will eventually break up" and that "a challenge to the centralized soviet state" would occur as a result of devolutionary trends. Both happened.

In the 1970s we published a first person account of a then illegal abortion.

In 1971 we published our first article in support of single payer universal health care